skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It depends on which alternative you're thinking of.

- }, like C: Lua uses this to terminate tables. You could use the same token for both purposes (Perl5 does) but the reduced redundancy comes at some cost to both readability and syntax error reporting, which are especially important in languages aimed at driveby programmers, like Lua.

- ): Lisps generally just use ) to terminate every construct, reducing redundancy further.

- different end tokens for each construct, like Ada and the Bourne shell (endif/end if/fi): improves readability and error reporting further, but requires more reserved words and is wordier.

- end, like Lua: intermediate among the above choices.

- indentation, like Python: seems to work well enough in Python, and especially helps beginners who are therefore not permitted to indent their code incorrectly, and adds a maximum amount of redundancy for opening and closing constructs (every line is explicitly tagged with its syntactic depth) without reducing readability. However, this aspect of Python was novel when Python was introduced, remains controversial, and has not been widely adopted in new languages.

A funny thing about Lua's syntax is that it's not newline-sensitive, but semicolons are optional. This is valid Lua:

function x(a, b)f(a)f(b)g = a b = a end

Wherever two things are juxtaposed that can't be part of a single statement, it tries to parse them as two statements. This syntactic looseness means that some syntax errors that would be easily detected in semicolon languages aren't easily detected in Lua. This increases the penalty for removing additional syntactic redundancy.
Wow that's great
Sigh.

When was the last time you used a Fibonacci algorithm when building a commercial product? I would hazard a guess around never. If you attempt to use O-notations to make informed predictions you are using your imagination to make wildly uninformed guesses, which is why nobody does that in real life.

My observation working 15 years as a JavaScript developer is that most people working professionally writing code cannot program or they can only in an extremely superficial level. Reading a popular code book about cracking the interview is a poor substitute.

If you really really want to know if a candidate is worth the words on their resume just ask them simple common sense things from a product perspective and see if you get back a simple common sense response. For example: Tell me how you would write a proxy to inspect or redirect traffic. or How would I inject real time data into the browser without polling the server?

The people that will over engineer simple questions into an ocean of bullshit are the same people that will turn your code into a mountain of dependency hell spaghetti. The goal is to look for confident people who don’t need to search for creative nonsense because they have solved world’s ills thousands of times and can do it in their sleep with about 3 lines of code without hoping some external tool will do it for them.
Ruby is optimized for developer happiness, and it is not a small thing. Ruby on Rails is optimized to build successful web application businesses as a highly efficient team. It minimizes boilerplate code, and thus, time to market, while giving guidance (the Rails Way) on how to design for growth and scale.
Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

"We don't write any documentation because we can't afford a dedicated QA process to certify it" <- that's dumb.
I've been avoiding bcachefs because the main author always seem to be stirring up some kind of internet drama. If they recommend users to stay away from Debian, I take that as a good reason to use Debian over other distros.

I like Debian's stability and don't really need my filesystem to move fast and break things. If this is the direction bcachefs is going, I don't think it's ever going to be a good platform to run an OS on top of.
Hmm, thinking back, think most companies I worked (from the small to the very large tech companies) had on average pretty good code and automated tests, pretty good processes, pretty good cultures and pretty good architectures. Some were very weak with one aspect, but made up for it others. But maybe I got lucky?
This is what I love about wezterm. I have a whole system that detects lightness and changes themes automatically, and also sends commands down to any open nvim instances to switch colourschemes there.
The only downside is that there is no going back for me haha.

Lua is also simple enough that if you want to have a static config, you can have a single table that is very json-like.
I'm surprised to hear that there's proprietary software that's competitive with OBS Studio. What is it?
Maybe it's rose colored glasses, but I recall finding new songs and even occasionally new artists on Pandora maybe 15ish years ago. It does seem like the last time I tried Spotify it was working really hard to make sure it didn't play me anything I hadn't heard before.
Open source is going to eat "Open"AIs lunch.

Llama and Qwen are giving GPT and o# a run for their money. And you can build actual applications atop them.

Hunyuan is as good as Sora and works with ComfyUI and a robust set of open tooling and controlnets. LTX runs blindingly fast on consumer hardware.

Nobody talks about Dall-E anymore which is how far the open models have progressed. Why use a shitty web UI when you can have Invoke's incredible inpainting, brushes, and layers for free? Or fine tune your own style?

This game isn't going to be about foundation models. The value of a foundation model is fungible and will go to zero. The switching costs are zero and there are too many players.

This is a game about compute and applications.

Thanks for speed running the game OpenAI and showing everyone the way. We don't need you anymore.
> I certainly don't have the capacity to deal with 3794 special snowflakes.

It's hardly unique. Every major language other than C/C++ (and Python, but Python is just a mess in general) works like Rust here. If anything I'd say it's the C people who are the snowflakes.

> Can you confidently claim that upstream developers are better at security than debian developers?

I can confidently claim that upstream has better policies. Debian routinely patches security-critical software without dedicated security review; this predictably lead to disaster in the past and will lead to disaster again.

Also the Debian SSL key bug was not just one more CVE on a par with any other. It was probably the worst security bug ever seen in general-purpose software.
Hello World on z/OS (2018)
Plenty of places don't take American Express or Discover even now, but most will usually take VISA and Mastercard.

Costco's a weird one though because they resisted credit cards for a long time until they had their Amex contract with the dual-branded Costco Amex card, but then dropped them for a dual-branded VISA card in 2016.
Rogfast [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogfast)
> And excusing Amex - why is that?! Fees alone?

To be fair, the core AMEX product is a charge card, not a credit card. They have more recently expanded into a few credit card products. I don't know the exact details, but my understanding is that the charge card system is more merchant hostile than the credit card system and more than simply larger fees.
Why not just ask ChatGPT?
> Dozens of other companies, including Google, Meta, and most recently Amazon, have come out with their own foundational models. Some, including Meta’s Llama and Mistral’s 7B, are open source, meaning they can be downloaded and used in other companies’ products free of charge.

To say that these models are open source is debatable. At least by the OSI definition, they aren't [1].

The models are free of charge for commercial use, but it may have restrictions (eg. Llama [2]).

[1] https://opensource.org/ai/open-source-ai-definition

[2]
> Can anyone access Llama models? What are the terms?
Llama models are broadly available to developers and licensees through a variety of hosting providers and on the Meta website. The Llama models are licensed under the applicable Llama Community License Agreement and accompanying Acceptable Use Policy, which provides a permissive license to the models along with certain restrictions to help ensure that the models are used responsibly. Hosting providers may have additional terms applicable to their services.
https://www.llama.com/faq/
The problem is that in IMAP the concept of labels doesn't exist. Thus they are implemented using folders, which is a concept in IMAP. But that issue is, a message is then in multiple folders (to reflect that it has multiple labels), but in the way this happens in IMAP, they are different messages, even if the content is the same. And thus I can imagine, automated programs, not aware of this, may for example see 2 invoices (because the email has 2 labels) rather than 1.
Sure, but often != always. And if your language forbids type inference then you are burdened with the cognitive load of worrying about types every single time whether there is a good reason in that instance or not.
This is an important point. Most people who I interact with would probably characterize me as an extrovert because I'm often super talkative and energetic, but the only reason I act like this is because I get time to "recharge" every day by spending time without interacting with anyone (other than my wife, who is the one person that doesn't take "energy" for me to spend time with). Even spending time with close friends and family members is something I need occasional breaks from to maintain my sanity.

I often describe this concept to people as a social "battery"; I need time to charge it (almost) every day in order to have anything to spend the next day, but it also can ruin the capacity if I charge it for too long while it's at max. Figuring out the right balance is key, especially when other circumstances can affect how much energy it feels like is expended by socializing (e.g. ambient stress level from other parts of my life.
There is no shortage of US candidates but there is a shortage of qualified US candidates. Getting an engineering degree from an average US college doesn't mean you are a qualified engineer. In fact, most new graduates know absolutely nothing about software engineering.

It's just the market is so bad now and those tech giants don't want to give them a shot. So many experienced engineers on the job market right now. Why hiring a new grad?
I'm mocking the whole idea of this or that lobbying being done to crush a particular competitor, when tech companies are very much a Rising Tide Lifts All Boats business.
this is like saying you know all about how it is to be an orphan because you read Oliver Twist
I think you misread the word "form" as "forum" there.
To be fair, having to work with 1 based indexing when you're used to 0 would be a frustrating source of off-by-one errors and extra cognitive load
Not a bad idea! Maybe you could create a GH page with some public domain music for a demo.
> It just sucks, as it's barely a programming language at all.

I remember when I thought like this when I was first learning C++ and thought it was awesome because of all the features built into the language. Since then, I've learned that things that are "barely a programming language at all" like Lua—where you can easily learn the whole language and then write, if necessary, reflective object-oriented effortlessly parametrically polymorphic code—are actually the best languages of all. (Such extreme liberalism does require a compensating amount of discipline, as you say.)

Lua has its flaws (implicit nils, the nil/# interaction, default global, 1-based indexing, etc.) but minimalism is one of its major virtues.
Fun fact: H1-B labor is, in most cases, more expensive, because the company needs to pay extra attorney fees.
I don’t see why a vaccination effort should be complex or expensive. Unlike COVID, A5N1 is not a newly discovered novel threat. We have a stockpiled vaccine already:

https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/vaccines/influe...

And, more importantly, there is already a seasonal flu campaign every year. Interestingly, it was quadravalent until this year, when B/Yamagata was removed:

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/season/2024-2025.html

And, unlike COVID, we already know how to make influenza vaccines. I haven’t seen any explanation for why the CDC did not add A5N1 to the seasonal flu. Doing so seems likely to massively reduce the severity of a potential outbreak of human-transmissible A5N1 and maybe even decrease the probability of an outbreak at all, and it would get about 50% coverage of the US population with no special effort at all beyond the effort of specifying it for the seasonal vaccine.
Mayhaps Orion staged a takeover?
It is funny, isn't it? I always wonder how the language would be perceived had they gone with zero based indexing from the start.

I'm a big fan of Lua, including for the reasons you mention. I suspect the reason this one thing is always brought up is twofold: it's easy to notice, and it's very rare these days outside of Lua (if you consider VB.NET to be a legacy language, anyway). Other criticisms take more effort to communicate, and you can throw a rock and hit ten other languages with the same or similar issues.
>And yeah the problem is that the initramfs is built on the machine itself. So it would have to have the signing keys which defeats the purpose.

Just brainstorming here.

What if the initramfs was rebuilt every time the OS was upgraded. During an OS upgrade, the user is asked to cold boot, the machine does a special boot, requests the user's disk decryption password, and uses it to build and sign the new initramfs, based on files signed by distro maintainers.

Then for every ordinary boot, immediately after disk decryption, we keep the disk decryption password in memory for just a little bit longer, and use it to check the signature on the initramfs before continuing with the boot.

The "signature" could be the secure hash of [the disk decryption password concatenated with the initramfs binary], or something (ask a crypto expert -- perhaps KDF+HMAC is better?)

I'm guessing the disk decryption password is much harder to steal than the user's root password?

(I might be totally out to lunch here, I know nothing about Linux boot. The above comment is written in the spirit of "learning about things by asking dumb questions"!)
Also good for having default activities performed on object or subsystem. For instance, by default, always having an object have security checks to make sure it has permission to perform the tasks it should be (have seen this, and sounds like a good idea at least). And also, to have some basic logging performed to show when you've entered and left function calls.
It's easy to forget to add these to a function, especially with large codebase with lots of developers
>In such a densely packed city, space can feel zero sum

...as opposed to rural areas, where space is constantly being created out of nothing?
If you think this sort of thing is fun, you'll enjoy this: https://github.com/jcalvinowens/asmhttpd/blob/master/asmhttp...

It's a webserver written in x86 assembler, which makes raw syscalls. It has no functions, and unmaps the stack so it uses only one 4KB page of memory at runtime.
Great stuff! Does it have a Session/Workspace concept? Maybe we can learn from how Alacritty does it integrating with tmux?
This does look great! Unfortunately it looks like it'll be hard for me to build it; it's yet another project that got fucked over by the Python community's irresponsibility.
OSX statically links everything and has for years. When there was a vulnerability in zlib they had to release 3GB of application updates to fix it in all of them. But you know what? It generally just works fine, and I'm not actually convinced they're making the wrong tradeoff.
An LLM would have written a much more convincing argument that "Lua is underrated".

This blog has just three posts, none with significant content. I was curious how this article even wound up on HN, until I realized that it was submitted by the blog's author: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nflatrea
TBH I think the distro model probably works really nicely for C-and-friends, from days of yore. When there was no package manager for C, resources like disk space were limited and the “ecosystem scale” of programming was a bit smaller. In this situation the benefits provided by distro-package-managers are large.

However, I think programming and the ecosystem is different these days and I am beginning to think the “single globally shared dylibs” model isn’t a good fit for many of the more recent programming languages and ecosystems.

We’ve seen it with the bcacheFS stuff and I think we’ll see it with more stuff in the future. I suspect there’s fundamental culture differences.

As mentioned elsewhere in the thread, I’d be interested in a distro model that split out “OS” and “app” level management and does not concern itself with “user”/“app” level dependencies, beyond maybe tracking the installed versions of apps, and little else.
Taylor Lorenz? Don’t forget your Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect as you read this…
I weep for the people who have to read your code when you're not around
Especially when one of the language's main purposes is to be embedded in applications written in other languages (which are predominantly zero based) - and so you tend to have a lot of back-and-forth integration between these two styles that can get confusing. Even from the C API side, for example, the Lua stack is one-based but addressed exclusively from the host language which is likely zero-based.
It wasn't run by upstream. It was run by the wrong mailing list, and only for one half of the Debian changes.
In other news, Trump officials confirm that they have found a reputable counterparty for their new Strategic Bitcoin reserve, Badenov & Fatale inc. Through a spokesman, the company has announced it is pleased to be a part of this strategic benefit to its country.
Amazing they didnt show a map.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tunnels_of_the_Faroe_I...
Lua is not underrated. It’s how many now, still 4(?) different languages which continue to suicide after a few years, all with cringe [re]design decisions, half-assed mechanics and lack of convenience that authors refuse to address. I spent many years on it (embedding, metaprogramming, all the deep things) and it is one of my biggest regrets in the choice of tech. The amount of effort you’ll put into not sliding out of this crazy ride nullifies all the promises of easyness, which is limited to trivial things anyway and explodes with complexity in any non-trivial data exchange. Its only upside is low footprint, but I fail to see where it matters today (apart from nodemcu whose active users could probably fit in one closet).

https://github.com/nodemcu/nodemcu-firmware

Based on Lua 5.1.4 or Lua 5.3 but without debug, io, os and (most of the) math modules

As expected, they didn’t bother to support all versions and probably were done with it after 5.4 announcement.
Which JS VMs have you tried embedding? People in this thread have suggested https://github.com/Moddable-OpenSource/moddable, https://bellard.org/quickjs/, and https://duktape.org/, but I haven't tried any of them.
I don't know what the "FLA" or "FSFA" is (are they real things or is this an AI-generated comment?), but the FSF traditionally required copyright assignment, which gave them all the rights in Oracle's CLA and more.
The deadliest tsunami set off work to be ready for the next big wave
What's "original timezone"? Most libraries implement timezone aware dates as an offset from UTC internally. What tzinfo uses oracle? Is it updated? Is it similar to tzinfo used in your service?

It's highly complicated topic and it's amazing PostgreSQL decided to use instant time for 'datetime with timezone' type instead of Oracle mess.
That’s fine but how people term introvert to be reclusive is inaccurate.
The 1-based indexing feels too icky to me. It was a language designed for non-programmers and it shows, imo.
Related:

Aviation experts say Russia’s air defense fire likely caused Azerbaijan plane crash as nation mourns - https://apnews.com/article/azerbaijan-airliner-crash-aktau-k...
https://archive.ph/v6p3x
I was looking at the team $25/mo last week and it had mentioned priority access but that language is gone and instead I see Team data excluded from training by default. It seemed worth the difference, but now less clear with changes in description. Basically I just want to know if it's a 'superset' better or has tradeoffs.
I've been trying to find discussion of this topic on Hacker News between October 1582 and September 1752, but to no avail.

'cal 9 1752' is .. funny. I guess instead of doing this annoying a-periodic leap second business, they accumulated a bunch of leap seconds owed, and skipped 11 days at one go. Sysadmins at the time were of divided opinion on the matter.
Here's why I think it's worth it:

1. Larger Context Window (128K)

With Pro-Mode, I can paste an entire firmware file—thousands of lines of code—along with detailed hardware references, and the model can actually process it.
This isn’t possible with the smaller context window on the $20 tier. On the Pro plan, I’ve pasted like 30+ pages of MCU datasheet information plus multiple header files in a single go. The model is then reasonably capable to provide accurate, bit-twiddled code, many times on the first try. Is it always working on the first go? Sure sometimes, but often there's still debugging, and I don't expect people that haven't actually tried to do it before without AI could do it effectively. However, I can do a code diff using tools like beyond compare (necessary for this workflow) to find bugs and/or explain what happened to pro-mode perhaps with some top level nudge for a strategy to fix it, and generally 2-3 tries later we've made progress.

2. Deeper understanding, real solutions

When I describe a complex hardware/software setup—like the power optimization for the product which is a LiPo-rechargeable fan/flashlight, the Pro-Mode model can understand the entire system better and synthesize troubleshooting approaches into a near-finished solution, with 95–100% usable results.
By contrast, the non-pro plan can give good suggestions in smaller chunks, but it can’t grasp the entire system context due to its limited memory.

3. Practical Engineering Impact

I’m working on essentially the fourth generation of a LiPo-battery hardware product. Since upgrading, the Pro-Mode model helped us pinpoint power issues and cut standby battery drain from 20 days to over a year.
Like, this week it guided me to discover a stealth 800 µA draw from the fan itself when the device was supposed to be in deep sleep. We were consuming ~1000 µA of power when it should be about ~200 µA. Finally, discovered the fan issue and achieved 190 µA without it in the system, so now we have a move forward to add a load switch so the MCU can isolate it from the system before it sleeps. Bingo we just went from a dead battery in ~70 days (we'd already cut it from 20 days to 70 days with firmware changes alone) to now it should take about 1 year for it to drain. This is the difference between end users having zero charge when the open the box to being able to use the product immediately.

4. Value vs. Traditional Consulting

I’ve hired $20K short-term consultants who didn’t deliver half the insights I’ve gotten in a single subscription month. It might sound like an overstatement, but Pro-Mode has been the best $200 I’ve spent—especially given how quickly it has helped resolve engineering hurdles.

In short: Probably the biggest advantage is the vastly higher context window, which allows the model to handle large, interrelated hardware/software details all at once. If you work on complex firmware or detailed electronics designs, Pro-Mode can feel like an invaluable engineering partner.